Back in February, I wrote an article in The Sun detailing Cornell’s plans to deal with Microsoft’s newest operating system, Windows Vista. This major upgrade to the Windows platform made many changes to the underlying system that rendered several programs, including our own Bear Access, inoperable without tricky work-arounds.
Now, despite all this, and despite CIT’s official recommendation to hold off on Vista for the time being, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to delve into next-generation technology. And I’m not alone, according to the “Microsoft Vista Special Interest Group,” the committee making the official recommendations on Vista at Cornell. According to the minutes of their last meeting on Aug. 25, around a quarter of all dormitory computers are now running Windows Vista.
CIT and the University have done a truly commendable job thus far in bringing the campus up to date. The two biggest problems that I found with the Cornell infrastructure on Vista last semester — i.e. the Salsa infrastructure that was used to launch programs such as Just The Facts in last year’s release of Bear Access and the CUTV television service — have now been adequately dealt with. Additionally, student employees have seen great promise in last week’s release of the “Cornell Online Time Collection System,” or COLTS III. This new COLTS client is a web-based application that functions worlds better than the aging Java-based COLTS II.
That being said, I must confess that I have dumped Vista off my PC, once again returning to XP. It had nothing to do with Cornell, and everything to do with Vista itself. After eight months of using and living with Vista, I’ve come to the conclusion that Vista is simply not ready for the consumer world.
The primary indictment I have against Vista is for its substandard performance. Even on new PCs, branded as “Compatible with Windows Vista,” and with the flashy new Aero Glass interface turned off (which instantly kills any “sex appeal” from the upgrade), Vista’s speed and responsiveness lags in key areas. The lag is especially evident when performing file operations, such as moving a document or song from one folder to another on the same hard disk. What happens instantly in XP takes several seconds or even minutes in Vista.
Software and hardware incompatibilities continue to dog Vista at every turn. Zheng Gu ’09, author of CornellSun.com’s tech blog guTech could talk to you for hours about the unwillingness or downright inability for popular sound card manufacturer Creative Labs to update their mobile drivers for Vista. And a lot of business software continue to pose problems for Vista. This isn’t strictly Microsoft’s fault of course, but the fact that there are such issues a full nine months since Vista’s release is mind-boggling to me. If Microsoft is serious about Vista’s success, it needs to exert some of its influence in Silicon Valley to get device manufacturers and software developers to more robustly back the new platform.
However, there are signs that Microsoft may be taking a step back from the rabidly pro-Vista party line. On Sept. 27, Microsoft announced that they would be extending the Windows XP sales deadline to June 2008 from January. This means that big computer manufacturers like Hewlett Packard and Dell can continue to sell machines with Windows XP for six months longer than planned. Recent preview releases of XP’s next major update, Service Pack 3, have revealed that a host of Vista’s under-the-hood improvements are in fact being back-ported to the older operating system.
Does all of this mean that Microsoft is likely to abandon Vista any time soon? Probably not. In Q1 2008, Vista is expected to receive its own first service pack that may very well address many of the concerns that I’ve raised here. But in the meantime, if you’re in the market for a new machine — or if you bought a new machine that had Vista pre-loaded I’d recommend upgrading to Windows XP straight away. In this case, at least, older is better.